Making a multi-stage shopping cart

Hi all, just looking for some advice. I am a photographer and was wanting to sell some work on a website. I don't know much about making websites - just enough to get me by. What is the best way to sell things by having a product tailoring system - for example, different stages of the the buying process where you can refine what you want. Example, choose a print, then a size, then what you want it mounted on, then extras etc. I would like it to give a quote and the option of purchasing at the end, so it needs to integrate into a purchasing system. I have experimented with some free shopping cart systems and I can't find how to do this. Ta!

I have a cart which does something similar on a client's site. When the user clicks "Buy" the cart page is brought up with a list of items, with the selected item highlighted. There are size selection and color selection drop-downs that are colored red. When a required selection is made, the red highlighting goes away. When all required selections have been made the price is calculated and the item is put into the cart.

When the user is ready to "check out", the cart is submitted to the server for processing (in this case, either cash/check/money-order or Paypal are options). If the purchase is approved, inventory is adjusted, a confirmation is sent to the buyer, and a order notification is sent to the client to be filled and shipped.

This is a rather complex client-side operation set up and finalized by the server. If you're not into the coding side of web design, you'd probably have a lot of difficulty with it.